Steamroller Democracy

by digby

I don’t now about you, but I’m all on pins and needles waiting for the big speech tonight. The big question will finally be answered: how much is the president going to escalate the war and increase the American occupation?

Think about that. We just had an election that completely repudiated the president’s strategy in the Iraq war. Only 12% of the public supports sending in more troops today. The military is not backing this either. Yet what are we watching on television all day? “How many more troops is the president going to send to Iraq?”

This is not just a slap in the face to the democratic process, it’s a slap in the face to our concept of reality. I wrote before that this president has always governed by tantrum, and this is no exception. He is doing exactly the opposite of what logic would dictate, just as he did after the 2000 election debacle when he governed from the far right as if he’d won a huge ideological mandate — and after 9/11 when he nonsensically insisted that we invade a country that had not been involved in the attacks.

I can hardly believe my eyes that he is getting away with it again. It’s truly stunning.

I think that we have to start looking at this differently than we have up to this point. To me, this is looking more and more like a series of tests of the Republican belief that pure power is all that’s needed to govern in a democracy. Dick Cheney has proven — and will continue to submit this proof today — that the president can do anything he wants to do. He is impervious to public opinion. Indeed, unless an election hangs in the balance, Republicans in general have shown repeatedly over the last few years that they believe our government is based solely upon the raw exercize of institutional power.

12% percent of the citizens in this country support escalating the war in Iraq and yet the president is going to do it anyway. 12%. We are not living in a democracy if the president can escalate this war under those circumstances. And yet he will — and it will have the perverse effect of giving him more power as people continue to absorb the idea that the government needn’t take its wishes into account.

This puts the impeachment of president Clinton in a new light as well. I had always thought it was done as a sort of long term payback for Nixon (Impeach the dirty hippie!) and an emotional reaction to the fact that the thousand year reign they expected after Reagan didn’t actually materialize. But it may have been more than that in retrospect. It was always a fundamentally undemocratic action. It was not favored by the people at any point and Clinton’s approval ratings actually went up on the day they impeached him. They lost seats in the election contrary to historical precedent. Yet the Republicans pushed the impeachment button even though there were many lesser options they could have taken. They used their institutional power to spite the people’s will and it was only the Senate’s 2/3 rule for impeachment that saved the country from having an institutionally legal but thoroughly undemocratic coup.(They did not achieve a simple majority to convict, but they likely would have if it meant that Clinton would have been removed.)

They paid no price for that and it gave them the courage to blatantly use the institutional power of the Supreme Court in 2000 to decide a presidential election on a partisan basis despite the fact that Al Gore had clearly been the people’s preference in both the nation as a whole and Florida in particular. Even though the public favored counting all the votes and felt no urgency to settle the election prematurely, the word went forth that the nation would be in grave crisis unless the election was settled immediately in the Republicans’ favor. (Scalia even made the astonishing argument that Bush would have trouble governing if the nation were to find out that he got fewer votes!) This threat of grave crisis came from the fact that Tom Delay promised that he would refuse to acknowledge Florida electors who voted for Al Gore in favor of a special set of Bush electors sent up by the Florida Republican majority state legislature. This would have been another example of pure institutional power thwarting the will of the people. The Supremes saved Tom the trouble, but the outcome was clear. The Republicans would use every lever of institutional power at their disposal to ensure that George W. Bush would become president.

And then there was Iraq, which never made any sense. Many people knew it at the time and a large number of people who supported it were uncomfortable with it but didn’t quite know why or didn’t want to ask. It was an executive branch steamroller on which they tacked what we all knew was a superfluous congressional vote (and one that was only called because it put the Democrats in an unteneable position going into an election.) Just as there hadn’t been any stopping those earlier instances of undemocratic and inexplicable strongarm demonstrations of power, there was no stopping the invasion of Iraq.

The press and the political establishment supported all of this, pretending that the nation felt the opposite of how they did and often excusing the behavior and admonishing the people’s righteous anger by saying that the nation need to “heal” or it needed “stability” or had to “get over it.” And it wasn’t altogether irrational because the violent eliminationist rhetoric of the far right echoes in the backround of all these actions (even though many of the commenters are not fully cognizant of where their feeling of threatening unrest actually comes from and are instead stuck in some timewarp from 1969.)

And here we are again. The nation has spoken in no uncertain terms that it does not want the Iraq war to be escalted. Indeed, they have said they want it to be de-escalated. The president is going to do the opposite. And we are all standing by watching it happen. Oh there will be a few protests in the congress and some political theatre, but the message is already clear. The president can do what he wants to do.

I think that we must be honest and admit that we aren’t living in a real democracy anymore. Yes, it has the trappings of one. We hold elections and we petition our government and offices change hands. But it is so infected with spin and lies and the willingness of its leaders to deny the democratic spirit of the constitution at every turn that it no longer really functions as one.

It has never been more clear that the people are irrelevant in our system of government than it is at this moment. Fully 70% of the public disapproves of president Bush’s job performance. Even more disapprove of his Iraq policy and a large majority believe it was a mistake to invade and occupy Iraq in the first place. 88% do not want this war war to be escalated. His party just lost a large number of seats in both houses of congress over this issue.

And yet this 30% president with 12% support in the country is going to exactly the opposite of what the country wants him to do and he will get away with it. Democracy? Not so much.

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